I'm getting the following on my NV4x (doesn't seem to affect ATI GPUs):

Also the application seems to intermittently loose album covers (heh my Velvet Underground & Nico cover for instance) and the texture coordinates for said album cover(s) get intermittently corrupted as well...

The FSAA here seems kinda low as well. Are you using 4 sample SuperSampling w/ GL_NICEST as a MS filter hint or something else?

Yeah, I'm using Multisampling...it doesn't seem to be working on the nVidia chips. I've done things differently in my current code, so let me know how the AA looks in the next release.

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Also the application seems to intermittently loose album covers (heh my Velvet Underground & Nico cover for instance) and the texture coordinates for said album cover(s) get intermittently corrupted as well...

2. More visual indicators: things like single arrows on either side of the A-Z bar to move left and right, and other similar buttons, double arrow buttons to jump to the next or previous letter, and a play button, stop, pause, button, probably placed above the navigation bar.

Would like to echo the request for the above navigation cues/buttons.

An earlier poster also mentioned a Dashboard-style flip to album track listings. This feature, coupled with iTunes control (play, pause, etc) would really make the program evem more useful.

Extra sorting options would be appreciated (by Genre, by Artist, etc)

Small gripe. The album information is listed 'Artist - Album Title' when the albums are being sorted by album title. This is a bit odd to me because I focus on the beginning of the line to get an idea of were I am in the list.

Otherwise I love it! Performance is acceptable on by PB 1.33. No crashes yet with my 14 Gb library. Congratulations on creating the latest 'must-have' utility.

Great app. Thanks for the warning about AAC x MP3 files. However, I have many albums encoded in MP3 whose coverart are not showing up in CoverFlow. Actually, the first time I ran it it seem to have found many, but after deleting preferences and the Application Support/CoverFlow directory a few times to get it to re-scan, now I only have about 5 albums with cover art (out of hundreds).

Something else is going on here besides AAC but I don't know how to test for it.

A feature request in addition to some of the good suggestions here: Could you either clarify how CF updates the library (everytime it starts) or must it be done manually? Is there a command/shortcut to force it to update the database?

If its looking for coverart on the web, is there an indicator for this?

Could you add some explanation for albums which CF isn't able get the art (something that helps us correct the issue like a simple "non-existent").

2. ~/Library/Application Support/CoverFlow for the relevant .tiff or .jpg file.

3. Synergy

4. Clutter

5. Embedded in the MP3 file (specifically, the first track on the album)

6. Amazon searching

Once it's found a file, it copies it to the CoverFlow folder, and if it gets some spare CPU cycles it will compress it to the .s3tc format, for faster loading in the future.

This is done every time CoverFlow loads a texture off disk, so you don't need to force a rescan - it happens automatically. The initial 'preloading' sequence is just to give CoverFlow a bit of a head start, so that it's reasonably smooth the first time you're flicking through your library.

If CoverFlow hasn't managed to find artwork for an album, and you then add it to the MP3 file, then the next time that CoverFlow loads, it will pick up the new artwork.

However, artwork that's already in the CoverFlow directory will take precendence over this, so if CoverFlow is already displaying some album art then the best way to update it is to drag & drop the new artwork in.

If you really want to mess around in the Finder, you can put your own tiffs & jpegs into the CoverFlow folder directly - the naming convention is pretty obvious. The out-of-date .s3tc files will be automatically deleted the next time CoverFlow loads.

The Amazon loading is slow. They limit you to one request per second, so with a large library with not much artwork, you'll end up with a huge queue of artwork waiting to be downloaded.

Deleting the CoverFlow directory will force CoverFlow to go back and reload everything using the above sequence. I'm not sure why you're not seeing album art for your MP3 files (assuming the first track of the album has artwork, you should be fine) - however, I'd appreciate it if you try out the next release. I've updated the ID3 routines I'm using so they support AAC, and totally overhauled the way the work in doing so. Hopefully it'll work a bit better than the current one.

This is awesome. I just bought a new powerbook a few weeks ago and keep enjoying finding amazing applications like this that make computers fun to use again!

On my 1.67Ghz G4 w/ 1.5GB RAM it runs without errors or crashes. Some stalls, and not terribly quick, but nothing unexpected at least.

One bug like thing:Compilations don't quite work. They are registered correctly, but the problem is the artist field shows up. So on my Tribute to Weezer compilation, its displayed as "Affinity - Tribute to Weezer". Affinity is the band that plays the first song, but not the artist of the album. This isn't a big deal, just one of those icing on the cake things.

Additions that I'd love:- Full screen mode that stays fullscreen. I'd love to be able to bring my laptop down, hook it up to my TV and close the lid. Letting people at parties pick music only using Coverflow.- To go along with full screen: Some sort of quick drop down type deal that shows a list of the tracks (and if its a compilation, the artist). So I can double click the album and play it start to finish, or I can listen to just one song off the album.- A way to just start the album, or add it to the current "Party Shuffle" of iTunes (and if my previous suggestion were implemented, the same for a single track).

Thanks Catfish. I have found that CF does find more art as it stays open. Does it also update the album names? I've made some corrections in iTunes after noticing errors while browing CF but CF has yet to notice these changes. Will it?

On another topic (not your bug): on my 2x2.0 G5 (revA), while CF is open, the "chirping is incessant. I guess its related to the constant redrawing through the GPU or something, as I've noticed that the "chirping" comes on anytime something GPU related gets drawn.

On another topic (not your bug): on my 2x2.0 G5 (revA), while CF is open, the "chirping is incessant. I guess its related to the constant redrawing through the GPU or something, as I've noticed that the "chirping" comes on anytime something GPU related gets drawn.

Hmm. Try the new version when it's out, I've dropped the CPU usage while CoverFlow's in the background, at least.

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Is the new version available for download yet?

Nope. Gimme a couple of days.

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Anyway, Catfish, could you implement a way to switch CoverFlow into a mode to search Albums by Artist instead of just Album Title?

Working on it.

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Edit #2: Also, is there a way for CoverFlow to "discover" new tracks added to your iTunes library while it's running? Could this be handled by a special Cocoa Event?

Mmm...maybe. I know they added some sort of notifications for certain events in recent versions, but I'm not sure if that includes new track notifications.

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Edit: yeah, you building a "CoverFlow" playlist on the fly.

Crap way of doing it, but it's the only way I've been able to persuade to work reliably.

The first time I ran it, it found a bunch of album artwork with seemingly little difficulty. Then I started mousing about in the window and BAM! The screen blanked with a bunch of garbage (random little blocks of colour, stuff like that) and then went black. The system didn't respond, so I rebooted it. That was my first crash under Tiger (Dual 1.8GHz G5, 2GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro).

Time for me to chime in. This is a lot of fun! I love the touch of the perspective changing slightly when the mouse moves around.

As for feature improvements, I think it would be great to be able to select a particular track from an album. By mouse this could be accomplished a single click generating some sort of drop down list of tracks with a double-click still playing the entire album. Via keyboard, pressing down could drop the list down.

Originally posted by vafarmboy:Time for me to chime in. This is a lot of fun! I love the touch of the perspective changing slightly when the mouse moves around.

As for feature improvements, I think it would be great to be able to select a particular track from an album. By mouse this could be accomplished a single click generating some sort of drop down list of tracks with a double-click still playing the entire album. Via keyboard, pressing down could drop the list down.

Great work!

Idea:

Have the album grow (zoom) and rotate (like Dashboard Widgets) to show the list of tracks.

It would also be nice to be able to select a genre (somehow) and have the relevant albums "step to the front" (or the irrelevant ones "move to the backgroud").

Man, there is so much potential here! Get this working with Tivo also so we can browse our music from the TV (great for parties - see iSeeiTunes)

Originally posted by feelgood:Rendering errors w/ the text overlay on NV40...

I'm getting the following on my NV4x (doesn't seem to affect ATI GPUs):

I do text rendering with FTGL ( which is what IIRC Catfish is using ), and I've seen this when you attempt to display text with GL_TEXTURE_2D turned off. I don't know why it would be turned off, but accidents happen. Somewhere state must be getting confused.

I've been running this for a couple of weeks with no issues or crashes, it's a lovely app and really fulfills the brief of flipping through your vinyl collection. I'm running it on a dual 2ghz G5, 2.5gb Ram, NVidia 6800 Ultra and 10.4

The FSAA here seems kinda low as well. Are you using 4 sample SuperSampling w/ GL_NICEST as a MS filter hint or something else?

Alright update here... I've just gotten finished running your app through OpenGL Profiler and it seems that you aren't getting a Multisample compatible pixel format on the NV40 or R200. I'm having similar problems w/ GL_ARB_multisample and GLPlayer only in my case, when I enable GL_ARB_multisample w/ NSOpenGLPFASamples = 4 and NSOpenGLPFASampleBuffers = 1 i.e. 4x FSAA (along w/ NSOpenGLPFASupersample *or* NSOpenGLPFASampleAlpha it doesn't matter) I start getting *very* unstable resize behavior (i.e. it frequently causes KPs). Right now I'm thinking this issue is limited to DP machines because a few people testing my application are NOT seeing this on the SP G5.

Either way when I request a NON Multisample compatible pixel format my resize behavior once again performs normally but (of course) the visuals looks like ass So if anyone else is seeing this behavior w/ their application(s) PLEASE file a bug report so we can get this issue fixed pronto (bugreporter.apple.com).

Here we go again...Don't expect too much from this release. I've been busy, and no doubt have left all sorts of stuff broken. I probably won't be free over the next few days to fix things for you, either.Bah, who knows - might work perfectly

this is a very solid and enjoyable program to use. if you can implement the track name on the other side of the album it would be just incredible. nevertheless, it's a great piece of software - seems to have found many more covers than before and even when maximized on my pg 1.67 with 1.5 gigs ram looks just beautiful and flips through without any glitches.

thanks and keep up the good work.

edit: when in full screen mode the arrow keys don't work. also, how do you get out of fullscreen? esc doesn't work.

Originally posted by Catfish:So...does the lack of comments mean that everyone's lost interest already, or that it works flawlessly?Could do with some sort of feedback before releasing the new version on the unwashed masses.

Hey Catfish I know the feeling... P.S. Your program rocks

Another note... How are you dealing w/ fullscreen in this program? I'd like to add a similar effect w/ one of my apps. I guess I'll e-mail you on this

Thanks again Catfish for updating your program. Good to see you still fixing that nice code. This new version runs v.smooth, but have you been doing any tweaks to your art grabbing code? I notice that quite a few albums have artwork now that didn't have it before, but it's the wrong artwork. Very amusing some of these new covers Acase in point: one early Detroit techno/electro multi artist comp is somehow now seen as a 'Hits of WW II' type of comp Mostly it's just compilations that have this problem, but also some artist albums. And one that had the right cover before doesn't now. Other than that, everything works fine.

How can I remove an image I know is wrong? My Beatles 1 album has the art for a Pavement album and the artwork at Amazon has a 20% off "sticker" on it so I don't want to use that right now. I'd rather just delete it and look for the proper art at my leisure.

[Edit] It would also be nice to enable the standard opt-click for "scroll to here" instead of having to click multiple times or click & drag.

Originally posted by brazuca:Quick bug report: The text in the button at the very bottom of the window (what I assume shifts the order between albuma and artist) is unreadable. The colors and the font are all jumbled.